Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

But the man had killed and the man had to die. He sighted along the gun. Miles saw the movement of his eyes.

He went down heavily on his knees. “Oh, God, Mr. Taylor, don’t shoot! I told her I wouldn’t bother her any more. It’s all off, finished. You’ll never see me again.”

Bret stepped back a pace. “You told who you wouldn’t bother her? Miss West?”

“Yeah, sure. I promised her.”

“Were you and she in this together?”

“Yeah, but I told you it was all off. You don’t have to worry about me any more, Mr. Taylor. I’ll give her back the money, all of it I got left. I’ll do anything you say.”

For a sick and ugly moment Bret’s hand had squeezed on the trigger, trying to fire the gun. It was what he had come here to do. It was what Miles deserved. But he could not do it. He had never shot an animal in the field, and a man was harder to shoot, if only because he had a greater capacity for fear than any animal. His years in the Pacific had given him an insurmountable backlog of sympathy, of fellowship with fear. As the fever went out of him he realized that he had no right to impose the fear of death on anyone.

“Get up,” Bret said.

Miles watched the lowering arm, the gun declining from the level of his head toward the empty floor. He was still on his knees, but his posture seemed less abject.

“Get up. I’m taking you to the police.”

“You can’t do that!” Miles yelped. “They got my handprint. It’ll put me in the gas chamber.”

“You’ll get what you deserve. I told you to get up.”

“You take me to the cops, and I’ll spill everything. Everything, you understand? You may be crazy, but you’re not that crazy.”

This is the end of Paula, he thought, of everything we planned for the future – the end of Paula and the end of me. But he could not kill Miles, and he could not let him go free. “Get up,” he said.

Miles sprang toward him instead, his two hands at Bret’s ankles and his shoulder crashing against Bret’s knees. Bret went down on his back with a thud that knocked out his wind. His hand squeezed the gun in reflex. It fired once, then clattered on the floor somewhere behind his head.

Miles’s hands were working up his body, pounding his stomach, tearing savagely at his face, closing on his throat. Bret jerked his hips, upward, unseating the man astride him and twisting onto his stomach. The hands returned to his throat from behind. Lowering his head, he brought his knees under him, straight-armed the floor, and rose to his feet. Miles was still behind him with his left arm hooked around his neck, his right fist pounding his kidneys.

He dropped to his knees again, jerking Miles forward and down with him, and reached up for Miles’s head. He found it and took hold. Miles came over his shoulder, somersaulting in the air, and struck the floor with the full length of his body. But he was quick. Before Bret could pin him he was away and turning at the wall.

Bret looked for the gun and couldn’t see it. A blow on the side of his face turned him around and sent him staggering to the other side of the room. Miles was after him before he recovered his balance. A heel in the small of his back slammed him against the wall and brought him to his knees with the feeling that his body had been broken in two. The second kick caught him a glancing blow on the nape of the neck. His head crackled and went numb, though he could still feel the raw half of his face that the rough wall had abraded. He twisted on his knees in time to receive the third kick in the stomach.

Miles closed in on him then, striking rapidly at his face with both fists. They hurt, but they didn’t rock him hard. That was wonderful. Miles was fast and tricky, but he couldn’t hit. All he had to do was take the punishment and concentrate on getting to his feet. The trouble was that his legs were hard to handle. And he couldn’t concentrate on them properly with those fists in his face.

He flung himself up and out, trying to butt with his head. Miles stepped back just far enough and cuffed him to the floor with a rabbit punch. He rolled sideways and felt the iron leg of the bed against his head. Then Miles was behind him again, and the hands were at his throat. Bret caught hold of an individual finger and bent it backward. Miles sighed, and the hands went away.

Bret rolled onto his face, got his knees under him again, and raised the weight of his body with his legs. Miles caught him on the point of the chin with a long uppercut, almost before his hands had left the floor. He staggered backward, but his legs held him up. The man could not hit. That was wonderful.

“You can’t punch,” Bret tried to say. He discovered that his mouth was too numb to be used for speaking. He put his left fist in front of it, cocked his right, and moved in on Miles on his badly disciplined legs.

Miles waited for him, watching his feet. Bret feinted with his left awkwardly. Miles countered and came off balance. Bret’s right struck him heavily in the neck just below the ear. Miles backed away, stubbed his heel on the wall, moved sideways along it. Bret followed him.

“You’re finished,” Bret said. “I’m going to spoil your face for good.” He had to speak elaborately, like an elocutionist, in order to form the words.

Miles was no longer watching Bret’s feet. He had noticed his own left hand. Its second finger projected rigidly, bent back at a right angle with the back of his hand. He whimpered.

Bret hit him between the eyes with all his force. He felt the bones move in his right hand, grinding against each other like stones in a bag. Miles was sliding down the wall inch by inch, his face turned sideways and his eyes fixed.

Bret walked to the bed and lay across it. The cold metal of the knife handle came in contact with his face. He pushed it onto the floor with a weary gesture. All his remaining energy was going into an effort not to be sick. The sickness was pressing upward from his stomach into his throat.

There was a slight movement on the floor behind him, the rustle of cloth against wood. Slowly he raised himself and turned. Miles was squatting in the corner with the gun. The flow of time stopped suddenly, like a river frozen in an instant by incredible cold. For the duration of the endless moment Bret looked into the muzzle, the dark, round mouth from which, like a roaring word of command imposing silence, death would come. All the traffic of his mind passed through that narrow hole, the rat hole through which his life, like a rodent fleeing from a collapsing building, was going to leave his body. Yet he was too tired to be afraid, and too certain that the end had come, to try to change it. He had found what he was looking for, and he had hoped for nothing more than this. Then the moment ended. Another moment began, and he was still alive.

Someone knocked on the door with an object heavier than a fist.

Bret said: “Come in,” without turning his head. He was dizzy with the effort of continuing to live, but all his muscles had tensed for action.

“Stay out of here,” Miles yelled. “I’ll shoot.”

“Stand back from the door,” a man’s voice bellowed. “We got a Tommy gun.”

“So you brought the law, you bastard!” Miles was snarling. “I warned you.” He fired at Bret.

A fraction of a second ahead of the bullet, Bret rolled off the bed onto the floor.

A loud stuttering sounded from the balcony, and a series of irregularly spaced holes made an inverted V in the middle of the door. Miles fired at the door. Bret rolled to the wall and lay still.

“Drop your gun and come out with your hands on your head,” the voice commanded. “This is your last chance.”

Miles fired again from the corner and started for the door of the bathroom. The rapid fire of the submachine gun began again, and a row of holes marched across the door and the opposite wall. Miles fell to his knees in a little cloud of plaster dust and crawled the rest of the way to the bathroom door. At the threshold he fell on his face and stopped moving. Bright arterial blood spouted from his mouth.